To me, it’s super exciting to play ping pong with ideas up until I arrive at an architecture and interfaces, that I am fine with.

My whole life I have been reading other people’s code to accumulate best practices and improve myself. While a lot of developers start with reading documentation, I have always started with reading code.

And where I was previously using the GitHub Code Search to eat up as much example code as I could, I am now using LLMs to speed the whole process up. Enormously. I for one enjoy using it.

That said, I have been in the industry for more than 15 years. And all companies I have been at are full of data silos, tribal knowledge about processes and organically grown infrastructure, that requires careful changes to not break systems you didn’t even know about.

Actually most of my time isn’t put into software development at all. It’s about trying to know the users and colleagues I work with, understand their background and understand how my software supports them in their day to day job.

I think LLMs are very, very impressive, but they have a long way to go to reach empathy.